


The Wrong Grave, a Retelling

by sav_guilmette_86



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Grieving, Kelly Link, Lucretia is the narrator, Lup dies, Oneshot, The Wrong Grave, sorry spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-04
Updated: 2020-02-04
Packaged: 2021-02-28 01:48:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,256
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22555846
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sav_guilmette_86/pseuds/sav_guilmette_86
Summary: A rewriting of Kelly Link's short story The Wrong Grave. I was immediately inspired upon reading it, and couldn't help but imagine it as a Blupjeans story. :) TW for character death and grieving, and car crashes. Lucretia plays the narrator, despite it never being explicitly stated. I suggest reading the original story as well, found in the compilation Pretty Little Monsters (also by Kelly Link).
Relationships: Barry Bluejeans & Lup, Barry Bluejeans/Lup, Lup & Taako (The Adventure Zone), blupjeans - Relationship
Kudos: 3





	The Wrong Grave, a Retelling

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [The Wrong Grave](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/556351) by Kelly Link. 



ALL OF THIS happened because an eighteen-year-old I once knew named Barry Bluejeans decided to go into the resurrectionist business and dig up the grave of his girlfriend, Lup Taaco, who had been dead for not quite a year. Barry planned to do this in order to recover the sheaf of poems he had, in what he’d felt was a beautiful and romantic gesture, put into her casket at the funeral. It had just been a really dumb thing to do. He hadn’t made copies. Barry had always been impulsive. I think you should know that right up front.

He had tucked the poems, handwritten, tear-stained and with cross-outs, under Lup’s hands. Her ﬁngers had felt like candles, stiff and pleasantly cool, until you remembered that they were ﬁngers. And he couldn’t help noticing that there was something wrong about her expression. If Lup had known that she was going to die, would she have told him? One of the poems was about that, about how he would never know, how it was too late now. Carpe diem before you run out of diem.

Lup’s eyes were closed, someone had done that, too, just like they’d arranged her hands, and even her smile looked composed, in the wrong sense of the word. Barry wasn’t sure how you made someone smile after they were dead. Lup didn’t look much like she had when she’d been alive. That had been only a few days ago. Now she seemed smaller, and somehow, oddly, larger. It was the nearest Barry had ever been to a dead person, and he stood there, looking at Lup, wishing two things: that he was dead, too, and wishing that it were appropriate to bring along his notebook and a pen. He felt he should be taking notes. She would’ve encouraged him to. After all, this was the most signiﬁcant and terrible thing that had ever happened to Barry. A great change was occurring within him, moment by singular moment.

Poets were supposed to be in the moment, and also stand outside the moment, looking in. For example, Barry had never noticed before, but Lup’s long, elven ears were slightly lopsided. One was smaller and slightly higher up. Not that he would have cared, or written a poem about it, or even mentioned it to her, ever, but it was a fact and now that he’d noticed it he thought it might have driven him crazy, not mentioning it. He bent over and kissed Lup’s forehead, the tears held back for now. Barry’s mind was full of poetic thoughts. Every cloud had a silver lining, except there was probably a more interesting and meaningful way to say that, and death wasn’t really a cloud. He thought about what it was: more like an earthquake, maybe, or falling from a great height and smacking into the ground, really hard, which knocked the wind out of you and made it hard to sleep or wake up or eat or care about things like homework or whether there was anything good on TV. And death was foggy, too, but also prickly, so maybe instead of a cloud, a fog made of little sharp things. Needles. Every death fog has a lot of silver needles. Did that make sense? Did it scan?

Then the thought came to Barry like the tolling of a large and leaden bell that Lup was dead. This may sound strange, but in my experience it’s strange and it’s also just how it works. You wake up and you remember that the person you loved is dead. And then you think: really?

Then you think how strange it is, how you have to remind yourself that the person you loved is dead, and even while you’re thinking about that, the thought comes to you again that the person you loved is dead. And it’s the same stupid fog, the same needles or mallet to the intestines or whatever worse thing you want to call it, all over again.

Barry stood there, remembering, until Lup’s brother, Taako, came up beside him. The blonde elf’s eyes were red, his hair disheveled in a shitty bun. He’d only managed to put eyeshadow on one eyelid. He was wearing black pants, his IPRE letterman jacket, and one of Lup’s old T-shirts. Not even one of Lup’s favorite T-shirts. Barry felt awful for him, and for Lup, too.

They, along with the friend group, intended to go to the college this fall. They were currently trying to graduate high school. But Taako was no longer trying. Not since Lup’s death days earlier. He was resolute in the decision to turn down his acceptance letter. If Lup wasn’t going, then he wasn’t.

“What’s that?” Taako asked. His voice sounded hoarse and outlandish, as if he were translating from some other language. Something elvish, perhaps.

“My poems. Poems I wrote for her,” Barry said. He felt very solemn. This was a historic moment. One day biographers would write about this. “Three haikus, a sestina, and two villanelles. Some longer pieces. No one else will ever read them. They’re for her alone.”

Taako looked into Barry’s face with his dark, tear-ridden eyes. “I see,” he said. “She may have said you were a good scientist, but you’re a shitty poet.” Barry didn’t know what to make of this. He hadn’t gotten to know Taako that well yet, and had been hoping to form a bond during college. Now it would never happen. He frowned.

Taako tentatively put his hand down into the casket, smoothed Lup’s favorite dress, the one with the flames, and several holes through which you could see Lup’s itchy black tights. He held Lup's hand tightly for a few moments and said, getting choked up, “Well, goodbye, sis. Don’t forget to send a postcard. Te amo.”

Don’t ask me what he meant by this. Sometimes Lup’s brother said strange things. He was a lapsed Buddhist and a lousy student. Once he’d caught Barry cheating on an algebra quiz, and never let him hear the end of it. Relations between Barry and Taako had not improved during the time that Lup and Barry were dating, and Barry couldn’t decide whether or not to believe him about Lup not liking his poetry. Sometimes close twins had strange senses of humor, when they had them at all. He almost reached into the casket and took his poetry back. But Taako would have thought that he’d proved something; that he’d won. Not that this was a situation where anyone was going to win anything. This was a funeral, not a game show. Nobody was going to get to take Lup home.

Taako looked at Barry and Barry looked back. Lup wasn’t looking at anyone. The two people that Lup had loved most in the world could see, through that dull hateful fog, what the other was thinking, just for a minute, and although you weren’t there, I’ll tell you. I wish it had been me, Barry thought. And Taako thought, I wish it had been me, too.

Barry put his hands into the pockets of his new suit, turned, and left Taako standing there. He went and sat next to his own mother, who was trying very hard not to cry. She'd liked Lup. Everyone had liked Lup. A few rows in front, a girl named Ren from their culinary class was blowing her nose hard in some kind of frenzy of grief. When they got to the cemetery, there was another funeral service going on, the burial of the teen who had been in the other car, and the two groups of mourners glared at each other as they parked their cars and tried to ﬁgure out which grave site to gather around.

Two ﬂorists had misspelled Lup’s name on the ugly wreaths, LOOP and also LUPE, just like tribe members did when they were voting each other out on the television show  _ Survivor _ , which had always been Lup’s favorite thing about  _ Survivor. _ Lup had been an excellent speller, although the Panite minister who was conducting the sermon didn’t mention that.

Barry had an uncomfortable feeling: he became aware that he couldn't wait to get home and call Lup, to tell her all about this, about everything that had happened since she’d died. He sat and waited until the feeling wore off. It was a feeling he was getting used to. Lup had liked Barry because he made her laugh. Barry ﬁgured that digging up Lup’s grave, even that would have made her laugh. Lup had had a great laugh, which went up and up like a clarinetist on an escalator. It wasn’t annoying. It had been absolutely delightful, if you liked that kind of laugh. It would have made Lup laugh that Barry googled “grave digging” in order to educate himself. He read an Edgar Allan Poe story, he watched several relevant episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and he bought Vicks VapoRub, which you were supposed to apply under your nose. He bought equipment at Target: a special, battery-operated, telescoping shovel, a set of wire cutters, a ﬂashlight, extra batteries for the shovel and ﬂashlight, and even a Velcro headband with a headlamp that came with a special red lens ﬁlter, so that you were less likely to be noticed.

So it was eleven months from the day of the funeral, which happened to coincide with the twins’ birthday. He had seen Taako here earlier, grieving in private on a day that was meant to be their own, and was now his own. Barold decided to leave him be, as the elf wasn’t one for people’s pity. He just waited until nightfall.

Barry printed out a map of the cemetery so that he could ﬁnd his way to Lup’s grave off of Phoenix Lane, even—as an acquaintance of mine once remarked—“in the dead of night when naught can be seen, so pitch is the dark.” (Not that the dark would be very pitch. Barry had picked a night when the moon would be full.) The map was also just in case, because he'd seen movies where the dead rose from their graves. You wanted to have all the exits marked in a situation like that.

He told his mother that he was spending the night at his friend Magnus’s house. He told his friend Magnus not to tell his mother anything.

If Barry had googled “poetry” as well as “digging up graves,” he would have discovered that his situation was not without precedent. The poet and painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti also buried his poetry with his dead lover. Rossetti, too, had regretted this gesture, had eventually decided to dig up his lover to get back his poems. I’m telling you this so that you never make the same mistake.

I can’t tell you whether Dante Gabriel Rossetti was a better poet than Barry, although Rossetti had a sister, Christina Rossetti, who was really something. But you’re not interested in my view on poetry. I can assume some things about you, even if you don’t know me. You’re waiting for me to get to the part about grave digging.

Barry had a couple of friends and he thought about asking someone to come along on the expedition. But no one except for Lup knew that Barry wrote poetry. And Lup had been dead for a while. Eleven months, in fact, which was one month longer than Lup had been Barry’s girlfriend. Long enough that Barry was beginning to make his way out of the fog and the needles. Long enough that he could listen to certain songs on the radio again. Long enough that sometimes there was something dreamlike about his memories of Lup, as if she’d been a movie that he’d seen a long time ago, late at night on television. Long enough that when he tried to reconstruct the poems he’d written her, especially the villanelle, which had been, in his opinion, really quite good, he couldn’t. It was as if when he’d put those poems into the casket, he hadn’t just given Lup the only copies of some poems, but had instead given away those shining, perfect lines, given them away so thoroughly that he'd never be able to write them out again. Barry knew that Lup was dead. There was nothing to do about that. But the poetry was different. You have to salvage what you can, even if you’re the one who buried it in the ﬁrst place.

You might think at certain points in this story that I’m being hard on Barry, that I’m not sympathetic to his situation. This isn’t true. I’m as fond of Barry as I am of anyone else. I don’t think he's any stupider or any bit less special or remarkable than—for example—you. Anyone might accidentally dig up the wrong grave. It’s a mistake anyone could make.

The moon was full and the map was easy to read even without the aid of the ﬂashlight. The cemetery was full of cats, at this time of night. Something made Barry think that Taako might’ve planted catnip at his sister’s grave. It seemed like something he’d do.

Barry was not afraid tonight. He was resolute. The battery-operated telescoping shovel at ﬁrst refused to untelescope. He’d tested it in his own backyard, but here, in the cemetery, it seemed unbearably loud. It scared off the cats for a while, but it didn't draw any unwelcome attention. The cats came back. Barry set aside the decayed wreaths and bouquets, and then he used his wire cutters to trace a rectangle. He stuck the telescoping shovel under and pried up fat squares of sod above Lup’s grave. He stacked them up like carpet samples and got to work.

By two AM, Barry had knotted a length of rope at short, regular intervals for footholds, and then looped it around a tree, so he'd be able to climb out of the grave again, once he’d retrieved his poetry. He was waist-deep in the hole he’d made. The night was warm and he was sweating. It was hard work, directing the shovel. Every once in a while it telescoped while he was using it. He’d borrowed his mother’s gardening gloves to keep from getting blisters, but still his hands were getting tired. The gloves were too big. His arms ached.

By three thirty, Barry could no longer see out of the grave in any direction except up. A large white cat came and peered down at Barry, grew bored and left again. The moon moved over Barry's head like a spotlight. He began to wield the shovel more carefully. He didn’t want to damage Lup’s casket. When the shovel struck something that was not dirt, Barry remembered that he’d left the Vicks VapoRub on his bed at home. He improvised with a cherry chapstick he found in his pocket. Now he used his garden-gloved hands to dig and to smooth dirt away. The light emanating from his Velcro headband picked up the ingenious telescoping ridges of the discarded shovel, the little rocks and worms and worm-like roots that poked out of the dirt walls of Barry’s excavation, the smoother lid of Lup’s casket.

Barry realized he was standing on the lid. Perhaps he should have made the hole a bit wider. It would be difﬁcult to get the lid open while standing on it. He needed to pee: there was that as well. When he came back, he shone his ﬂashlight into the grave. It seemed to him that the lid of the cofﬁn was slightly ajar. Was that possible? Had he damaged the hinges with the telescoping shovel, or kicked the lid askew somehow when he was shimmying up the rope? He essayed a slow, judicious sniff, but all he smelled was dirt and cherry chapstick. He applied more cherry chapstick. Then he lowered himself down into the grave.

The lid wobbled when he tested it with his feet. He decided that if he kept hold of the rope, and slid his foot down and under the lid, like so, then perhaps he could cantilever the lid up—

It was very strange. It felt as if something had hold of his foot. He tried to tug it free, but no, his foot was stuck, caught in some kind of vise or grip. He lowered the toe of his other tennis shoe down into the black gap between the cofﬁn and its lid, and tentatively poked it forward, but this produced no result. He’d have to let go of the rope and lift the lid with his hands. Balance like so, carefully, carefully, on the thin rim of the casket. Figure out how he was caught.

It was hard work, balancing and lifting at the same time, although the one foot was still ﬁrmly wedged in its accidental toe hold. Barry became aware of his own breathing, the furtive scufﬂing noise of his other shoe against the cofﬁn lid. Even the white beam of his lamp as it pitched and swung, back and forth, up and down in the narrow space, seemed unutterably noisy. “Shit, shit, shit,” Barry whispered. It was either curse under his breath or fuckin’ scream. He got his ﬁngers under the lid of the cofﬁn on either side of his feet and bent his wobbly knees so he wouldn’t hurt his back, lifting. Something touched the ﬁngers of his right hand.

No, his ﬁngers had touched something.

Don’t be ridiculous, Barry.

He yanked the lid up as fast and hard as he could, the way you would rip off a bandage if you suspected there were baby spiders hatching under it. “Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit!” He yanked and someone else pushed. The lid shot up and fell back against the opposite embankment of dirt.

The dead girl who had hold of Barry’s boot let go.

This was the ﬁrst of the many unexpected and unpleasant shocks that Barry was to endure for the sake of poetry. The second was the sickening—no, shocking—shock that he had dug up the wrong grave, the wrong dead girl.

The wrong dead girl was lying there, smiling up at him, and her eyes were open. She was several years older than Lup. She was taller and had heavily pierced elf ears. She even had a tattoo. The smile of the wrong dead girl was crooked and beautifully imperfect. Lup had had braces that turned kissing into a heroic feat. You had to kiss around braces, slide your tongue up or sideways or under, like navigating through barbed wire: a delicious, tricky trip through No Man’s Land. Lup pursed her mouth forward when she kissed. If Barry forgot and mashed his lips down too hard on hers, she shoved his arms away. This was one of the things about his relationship with Lup that Barry remembered vividly, looking down at the wrong dead girl.

The wrong dead girl spoke ﬁrst. “Knock knock,” she said.

“What?” Barry asked, aghast.

“Knock knock,” the wrong dead girl said again.

“Who’s there?” he asked.

“Noelle,” the wrong dead girl said. “Noelle Redcheek. Who are you and what in Neverwinter are you doing in my grave?”

“This isn’t your grave,” Barry remarked, aware that he was arguing with a dead girl, and the wrong dead girl at that. “This is Lup’s grave. What are you doing in Lup’s grave?”

“Oh no,” Noelle Redcheek said. “This is my grave and I get to ask the questions.”

A notion crept, like little dead cat feet, over Barry. Possibly he had made a dangerous and deeply embarrassing mistake. His face reddened. “Poetry,” he managed to say. “There was some poetry that I, ah, that I..  _ accidentally _ left in my girlfriend’s casket. And there’s a deadline for a poetry contest coming up, and so I really, really needed to get it back.” It was a swift lie. He didn’t mean for it to sound so impersonal. He didn’t need it for some dumb contest. He wanted it back because.. in a way, it was all that he had left of her. If he couldn’t have Lup, he could have their memories together.

The dead girl stared at him. There was something about her hair that Barry didn’t like. “Excuse me, but are you for real?” she asked, a shit-eating grin on her face. “This sounds like one of those lame excuses. The dog ate my homework. My little brother ruined my project. I accidentally buried my poetry with my dead girlfriend.”

“Look,” Barry huffed, “I checked the tombstone and everything. This is supposed to be Lup’s grave. Lup Taaco. I’m really sorry I bothered you and everything, but this.. this isn't really my fault,” he said sincerely. The dead girl just stared at him thoughtfully. He wished that she would blink. She wasn’t smiling anymore. Her hair, lank and brownish, where Lup’s had been blonde and frizzy in summer, was writhing a little, like snakes. Barry thought of centipedes. Evard’s black tentacles.

“Maybe I should just go away,” Barry said. “Leave you to, ah, rest in peace or whatever.”

“I don’t think sorry cuts the mustard here,” Noelle Redcheek said. She barely moved her mouth when she spoke, Barry noticed. And yet her enunciation was ﬁne. “Besides, I’m sick of this place. It’s boring. Maybe I’ll just come along with.”

“What?” Barry balked. Anxiety pulsed through him as he felt behind himself, surreptitiously, for the knotted rope.

“I said, maybe I’ll come with you,” Noelle Redcheek said. She sat up. Her hair was really coiling around, really seething now. Barry thought he could hear hissing noises.

“You can’t do that!” he said. “I’m sorry, but no. Just.. no. You know why something like that isn’t possible.”

“Well then, you stay here and keep me company,” Noelle Redcheek smiled. Her hair was really something.

“I-I can’t do that either,” Barry quivered, trying to explain quickly, before the dead girl’s hair decided to strangle him. “I’m going to be a poet. It would be a.. a great loss to the world if I never got a chance to publish my poetry.”

“I see,” Noelle Redcheek said, as if she did, in fact, see a great deal. Her hair settled back down on her shoulders and began to act a lot more like hair. “You don’t want me to come home with you. You don’t want to stay here with me. Then how about this? If you’re such a great poet, then write me a poem. Write something about me so that everyone will be sad that I died.”

“I could do that,” Barry said. Relief bubbled up through his middle like tiny doughnuts in an industrial deep-fat fryer. “Let’s do that. You lie down and make yourself comfortable and I’ll rebury you. T-tomorrow I’ve got a quiz in American History, and I was going to study for it during my free period after lunch, but I could write a poem for you instead.”

“Today is Saturday,” the dead girl said matter-of-factly.

“Oh.” He paused. “Then no problem. I’ll go straight home and work on your poem. Sh-should be done by Monday.”

“Not so fast,” Noelle Redcheek remarked as she sat up a bit more.. “You need to know all about my life and about me, if you’re going to write a poem about me, right? And how do I know you’ll write a poem if I let you bury me again? How will I know if the poem’s any good? No dice. I’m coming home with you and I’m sticking around until I get my poem. ’Kay?”

She stood up. She was several inches taller than Barry. “Do you have any chapstick?” she asked, dusting off her outfit. “My lips are really dry.”

“Here,” Barry said. Then, “You can keep it.”

“Oh, afraid of dead girl cooties?” Noelle Redcheek asked with a laugh. She smacked her lips at him in an upsetting way.

“I’ll climb up ﬁrst,” Barry said. He had the idea that if he could just get up the rope, if he could yank the rope up after himself fast enough, he might be able to run away, get to the fence where he’d chained up his bike, before Noelle managed to get out. It wasn’t like she knew where he lived. She didn’t even know his name.

“Fine,” Noelle said. She looked like she knew what Barry was thinking and didn’t really care. By the time Barry had bolted up the rope, yanking it up out of the grave, abandoning the tele-scoping shovel, the wire cutters, the wronged dead girl, and had unlocked his road bike and was racing down the empty 5AM road, the little white dot of light from his headlamp falling into potholes, he’d almost managed to persuade himself that it had all been a grisly hallucination. Except for the fact that the dead girl's cold dead arms were around his waist, suddenly, and her cold dead face was pressed against his back, her damp hair coil-ing around his head and tapping at his mouth, burrowing down his ﬁlthy shirt.

“Don’t leave me like that again,” she said.

“No,” Barry said. “I won’t. Sorry.” He couldn’t take the dead girl home. He couldn’t think of how to explain it to his parents. No, no, no. He didn’t want to take her over to Magnus’s house either. It was far too complicated. Not just the girl, but he was covered in dirt. Magnus wouldn’t be able to keep his mouth shut.

“Where are we going?” the dead girl asked.

“I know a place,” Barry finally said after a moment. “Could you please not put your hands under my shirt? They’re really cold. And your ﬁngernails are kind of sharp.”

“Sorry,” the dead girl apologized, sounding surprisingly sincere. They rode along in silence until they were passing the 7-Eleven at the corner of Eighth and Bulwark, and the dead girl asked, “Could we stop for a minute? I wanna get some beef jerky. And a diet Pepis.”

Barry braked. “Beef jerky?” he asked, confused. “Is that what dead people eat?”

“It’s the preservatives,” the dead girl grinned.

Barry gave up. He steered the bike into the parking lot. “Let go, please,” he asked. The dead girl let go. He got off the bike and turned around. He’d been wondering just exactly how she'd managed to sit behind him on the bike, and he saw that she was sitting above the rear tire on a cushion of her horrible, shiny hair. Her legs were stretched out on either side, toes in black combat boots ﬂoating just above the asphalt, and yet the bike didn't fall over. It just hung there under her. For the ﬁrst time in almost a month, Barry found himself thinking about Lup as if she were still alive: Lup is never going to believe this. But then, Lup had never believed in anything like ghosts. She’d hardly believed in the school dress code. She deﬁnitely wouldn’t have believed in a dead girl who could ﬂoat around on her hair like it was an anti-gravity device.

“I can also speak ﬂuent Elvish,” Noelle Redcheek said.

Barry reached into his back pocket for his wallet, and discovered that the pocket was full of dirt. “I can’t go in there,” he said. “For one thing, I’m a teenager and it’s ﬁve in the morning. Also, I look like I just escaped from a gang of angry mongeese. I’m ﬁlthy.”

The dead girl just looked at him. He said, coaxingly, “You should go in. You’re older. I’ll give you all the money I’ve got. You go in and I’ll stay out here and think about the wording for the poem.”

“You’ll ride off and leave me here,” the dead girl said. She didn’t sound angry, just matter of fact. But her hair was beginning to ﬂoat up. It lifted her up off Barry’s bike in a kind of hairy cloud and then plaited itself down her back in a long, business-like rope.

“I won’t,” Barry lied. “Here. Take this. Buy whatever you want.”

Noelle Redcheek took the money. “How very generous of you,” she said.

“No problem,” Barry told her. “I’ll wait here.” And he did wait. He waited until Noelle Redcheek went into the 7-Eleven. Then he counted to thirty, waited one second more, got back on his bike and rode away. By the time he’d made it to the meditation cabin in the woods back behind Taako’s house, where he and Lup had liked to sit and play Monopoly, Barry felt as if things were under control again, more or less. There is nothing so calming as a meditation cabin where long, boring games of Monopoly have taken place. He’d clean up in the cabin sink, and maybe take a nap. Taako never came out here anymore. There were too many fond memories associated with the tree house, and he couldn’t bare to be out there without his sister beside him. Barry had snuck into the cabin a few times since Lup’s death, to sit in the dark and listen to the plink-plink of the meditation fountain and think about things. He was sure Taako wouldn’t have minded if he knew, although he hadn’t ever asked, just in case. Which had been wise of him.

The key to the cabin was on the beam just above the door, but he didn’t need it after all. The door stood open. There was a smell of incense, and of other things: cherry chapstick and dirt and beef jerky. There was a pair of black combat boots beside the door.

Barry squared his shoulders. I have to admit that he was behaving sensibly here, ﬁnally. Finally. Because—and Barry and I are in agreement for once—if the dead girl could follow him somewhere before he even knew exactly where he was going, then there was no point in running away. Anywhere he went she'd already be there. Barry took off his shoes, because you were supposed to take off your shoes when you went into the cabin. It was a gesture of respect. He put them down beside the combat boots and went inside. The waxed pine ﬂoor felt silky under his bare feet. He looked down and saw that he was walking on Noelle Redcheek’s hair.

“Sorry!” Barry said. He meant several things by that. He meant sorry for walking on your hair. Sorry for riding off and leaving you in the 7-Eleven after promising that I wouldn’t. Sorry for the grave wrong I’ve done you. But most of all he meant sorry, dead girl, that I ever dug you up in the ﬁrst place.

“Don’t mention it,” the dead girl mumbled. “Want some jerky?”

“Sure,” he said. He felt he had no other choice.

He was beginning to feel he would have liked this dead girl under other circumstances, despite her annoying, bullying hair. She had poise. A sense of humor. She seemed to have what his mother called “stick-to-itiveness”; what the AP English Exam preferred to call tenacity. Barry recognized the quality. He had it in no small degree himself. The dead girl was also extremely pretty, if you ignored the hair. You might think less of Barry that he thought so well of the dead girl, that this was a betrayal to Lup. Barry felt it was a betrayal. But he thought that Lup might have liked the dead girl too. She would certainly have liked her tattoo.

“How is the poem coming?” the dead girl asked.

“There’s not a lot that rhymes with Noelle,” Barry said. “Or Redcheek.”

“Noelle,” said the dead girl. There was a fragment of jerky caught in her teeth. “Swell. Bell. Bombshell.” She paused. “Redcheek. Mystique. Technique. Geek.”

“Maybe you should write the stupid poem,” Barry huffed, trying not to get frustrated. There was an awkward pause, broken only by the almost-noiseless glide of hair retreating across a pine ﬂoor. Barry sat down, sweeping the ﬂoor with his hand, just in case.

“You were going to tell me something about your life,” he said.

“Boring,” Noelle Redcheek said. “Short. Over.”

“That’s not much to work with. Unless you want a haiku.”

“Tell me about this girl you were trying to dig up,” Noelle said. “The one you wrote the poetry for. What was she like?”

“Her name was Lup,” Barry said. “She died in a car crash.”

“Was she pretty?” Noelle asked.

“Yeah,” Barry said.

“You liked her a lot,” Noelle said.

“Yeah,” Barry said.

“Are you sure you’re a poet?” Noelle asked. Barry was silent. He gnawed his jerky ferociously. It tasted like dirt. Maybe he’d write a poem about it. That would show Noelle Redcheek. He swallowed and asked, “Why were you in Lup’s grave?”

“How should I know?” she replied. She was sitting across from him, leaning against a concrete statue the size of a three-year-old, but much fatter and holier. Her hair hung down over her face, just like a Japanese horror movie. “What do you think, that Lup and I swapped cofﬁns, just for fun?”

“Is Lup like you?” Barry said. “Does she have weird hair and follow people around and scare them just for fun?”

“No,” the dead girl said through her hair. “Not for fun. But what’s wrong with having a little fun? It gets dull. And why should we stop having fun, just because we’re dead? It’s not all demon cocktails and Quiplash down in the old bardo, you know?”

“You know what’s weird?” Barry thought aloud, looking her in the face. “You sound like her. Lup. You say the same kind of stuff.”

Noelle Redcheek’s eyes darkened.

“It was dumb to try to get your poems back,” said the dead girl. “You can’t just give something to somebody and then take it back again.”

“Thats’s what she did,” he finally said out of the blue. It took him a moment to continue. “She gave me her love and took it with her death.”

A sniffle. He put the pad of paper down.

“I just miss her,” Barry mumbled. He began to cry.

After a while, the dead girl got up and came over to him. She took a big handful of her hair and wiped his face with it. It was soft and absorbent and it made Barry’s skin crawl. He stopped crying, more or less, which might have been what the dead girl was trying to remedy.

“Go home,” she said.

Barry shook his head. “No,” he ﬁnally managed to say. He was shivering like crazy.

“Why not?” the dead girl asked.

“Because I’ll go home and you’ll be there, waiting for me.”

“I won’t,” the dead girl said. “I promise.”

“Really?” Barry sniffled.

“I really promise,” spoke the dead girl. “I’m sorry I teased you, Barry.”

“That’s okay,” Barry said. He got up and then he just stood there, looking down at her. He seemed to be about to ask her something, and then he changed his mind. She could see this happen, and she could see why, too. He knew he ought to leave now, while she was willing to let him go. He didn’t want to fuck up by asking something impossible and obvious and stupid. That was okay by her. She couldn’t be sure that he wouldn’t say something that would rile up her hair. Not to mention the tattoo. She didn’t think he’d noticed when her tattoo had started getting annoyed.

“Goodbye,” Barry said at last. It almost looked as if he wanted her to hold his hand, but when she sent out a length of her hair, he turned and ran. It was a little disappointing. And the dead girl couldn’t help but notice that he’d left his shoes and his bike behind. She sighed lightly and frowned. It was just like him to do that.

The dead girl walked around the cabin, picking things up and putting them down again. She kicked the Monopoly box, which was a game that she’d always hated. That was one of the okay things about being dead, that nobody ever wanted to play Monopoly. At last she came to the statue of Pan, whose head had been knocked right off while practicing magic with Taako a long time ago. Lup Taaco had made Pan a lumpy substitute goat head out of modeling clay. You could lift that clay goat head off, and there was a hollow space where Barry and Lup had left secret things for each other. The dead girl reached down her shirt and into the cavity where her more interesting and useful organs had once been (she had been an organ donor). She put Barry’s poetry in there for safekeeping.

She folded up the poetry, wedged it inside Pan, and ﬁxed the goat head back on. Maybe Barry would ﬁnd it someday. She would have liked to see the look on his face.

  
  
  
  


We don’t often get a chance to see our dead. Still less often do we know them when we see them. Taako’s eyes opened. He looked up and saw the dead girl and smiled. He said, “Lup.”

Lup sat down on her brother’s bed. She took her twin’s hand. If Taako thought Lup’s hand was cold, he didn't say so. She held on tightly. “I was dreaming about you,” he told Lup. “You were.. back. You’d never died in the first place. It was one of the better dreams I’ve had about you this year, Lulu.”

“It was just a dream,” Lup said.

Taako reached up and touched a piece of Lup’s hair with her other hand. “You’ve changed your hair,” he said. “I like it.”

They were both silent. Lup’s hair stayed very still. Perhaps it felt ﬂattered.

“Thank you for coming back,” Taako said at last.

“I can’t stay,” Lup spoke.

Taako held his twin’s hand tighter. “I’ll go with you. That’s why you came back, isn’t it? Because I’m dead too?”

Lup shook her head. “No, Koko. You’re not dead. It’s Barry’s fault. He dug me up.”

“He did what?” Taako asked, an incredulous smile on his face. He forgot the small, low-ering unhappiness of discovering that she was not dead after all.

“He wanted his poetry back,” Lup explained. “The poem he gave me.”

“That dumbass,” Taako said. It was exactly the sort of thing he expected of Barry, but only with the advantage of hindsight, because how could you really expect such a thing. “What did you do to him?”

“I played a good joke on him,” Lup said. “Remember Noelle, that girl who moved before Barry came to town? I pretended I was her. It got a real spook out of him.” She smiled. She’d never really tried to explain her relationship with Barry to her brother. It seemed especially pointless now. She wriggled her ﬁngers, and Taako hesitantly let go of Lup’s hand.

Being a former Buddhist, Taako had always understood that when you hold onto your loved ones too tightly, you end up pushing them away instead. Except that after Lup had died, he wished he’d held on a little tighter. He drank up Lup with his eyes. He noted the tattoo on Lup's arm with both disapproval and delight. Disapproval, because somehow she had gotten that in her last waking weeks without him finding out about it. Delight, because something about the tattoo suggested Lup was really here. That this wasn’t just a dream. Dreaming about her never leaving was one thing. But he would never have dreamed that his sister had died, come alive again and was tattooed with long, writhing, midnight tails of hair.

“I have to go,” Lup said. She had turned her head a little, towards the window, as if she were listening for something faraway.

“Oh,” Taako said, trying to sound as if he didn't mind. He swallowed a lump in his throat. He didn’t want to ask, but very much did: Will you come back? He was a lapsed Buddhist, but not so very lapsed, after all. He was still working to relinquish all desire, all hope, all self. When a person like Taako suddenly ﬁnds that his life has been dismantled by a great catastrophe, he may then hold on to his belief as if to a life raft, even if the belief is this: that one should hold on to nothing. Taako had taken his Buddhism very seriously, once, before the harsh reality of life had knocked it out of him.

Lup stood up. “I’m sorry I wrecked the car,” she said, although this wasn’t completely true. If she’d still been alive, she would have been sorry. But she was dead. She didn’t know why she’d be sorry anymore. And the longer she stayed, the more likely it seemed that her hair would do something truly terrible. Her hair was not good Buddhist hair. It did not love the living world or the things in the living world, and it did not love them in an utterly unenlightened way. There was nothing of light or enlightenment about Lup’s hair. It knew nothing of hope, but it had desires and ambitions. It’s best not to speak of those ambitions. As for the tattoo, it wanted to be left alone. And to be allowed to eat people, just every once in a while.

When Lup stood up, Taako said suddenly, “I’ve been thinking I might.. leave this house.”

Lup waited.

“I-I’m gonna.. agree to the acceptance letter from the IPRE,” Taako said. “Sell the house, just pack up and.. maybe dorm with, like, Merle and Magnus for freshman year. Is that okay with you? Do you mind?”

Lup didn’t mind. She bent over and kissed her brother on the forehead. She left a smear of cherry chapstick. When she had gone, Taako got up and put on his bathrobe, the one with macarons and stars. He went downstairs and made coffee and sat at the kitchen table for a long time, staring at nothing. His coffee got cold and he never even noticed.

The dead girl left town as the sun was coming up. I won’t tell you where she went. Maybe she joined the circus and took part in daring trapeze acts that put her hair to good use, kept it from getting bored and plotting the destruction of all that is good and pure and lovely. Maybe she shaved her head and went on a pilgrimage to some remote lamasery and came back as a baller wizard with a dark past and some kick-ass fire moves. Maybe she sent her brother postcards from time to time, as he’d asked. Maybe she wrote them as part of her circus act, using the tips of her hair, dipping them into an inkwell. These postcards, not to mention her calligraphic scrolls, are highly sought after by collectors nowadays. I have two.

Barry stopped writing poetry for several years. He never went back to get his bike from Taako’s cottage, even when they all moved away for college. He stayed away from graveyards and also from girls with long hair. The last I heard, he was on an expedition for the IPRE with several close friends. He wrote several haikus before the mission. One of his best-known haikus was about the mission itself. It goes something like this:

A red bird passes

by, hurried. Feathers uncombed.

Full of fiery flames.


End file.
